Event Viewer

Applies To: Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista

The Event Viewer is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that enables you to browse and manage event logs. It is an indispensable tool for monitoring the health of systems and troubleshooting issues when they arise. For the latest information about Event Viewer, see Event Viewer online.

Event Viewer enables you to perform the following tasks:

View events from multiple event logs

Save useful event filters as custom views that can be reused

Schedule a task to run in response to an event

Create and manage event subscriptions

Viewing Events from Multiple Logs

When you use Event Viewer to troubleshoot a problem, you need to locate events related to the problem, regardless of which event log they appear in. Event Viewer enables you to filter for specific events across multiple logs. That makes it easy to display all events potentially related to an issue that you are investigating. To specify a filter that spans multiple logs, you need to create a custom view.

For detailed help with creating custom views, see the following topic:

Reusable Custom Views

When you work with Event Logs, your primary challenge is to narrow the set of events to just those that you are interested in. Sometimes this is easy. Other times this involves a great deal of effort; effort that is lost if you do not have some way to save the view of the logs that you worked so hard to create. Event Viewer supports the idea of custom views. Once you have queried and sorted your way to just the events you wanted to analyze, you can save that work as a named view and it will be available for you to reuse in the future. You can even export the view and use it on other computers or share it with other people.

Integration with Task Scheduler

Using Event Viewer, you can easily automate responses to events. Event Viewer is integrated with Task Scheduler, enabling you to right-click on most events to start scheduling a task to run when that event is logged in the future.